On the distribution of nominative and genitive case in modern Bengali

Hideki MAKI, Kenichi GOTO, Mohammed Joynal ABEDIN

This paper investigates the distribution of nominative and genitive case in modern Bengali (hereafter, Bengali), and discusses, based on the facts found, that Hiraiwa's (2001) Nominative Genitive Conversion (NGC) Universal, which states that NGC is not observed in the languages which use overt wh-movement strategy or overt complementizer strategy in relative clause formation, is not strictly universal, and needs to be reconsidered. In written forms of Bengali, the relative clause contains the relative pronoun jeta "which," which is an indication of overt wh-movement in relativization, yet a genitive subject is possible in the relative clause. This indicates that the NGC Universal does not hold in Bengali, which in turn suggests that it is not strictly universal among human languages.